Advice on NAS. Caddie + HDD, or off-the-shelf?

I have no experience at all with network attached storage, so thought I might run some stuff past you other geeks.

I want NAS, but it doesn't need to be that large (300-500GB mebs). This will be for MKV encoded HD films, and high res camera RAW images.

I hear that the HDD + caddie options rely on FAT32, which makes me think I may have trouble with any files larger than 4GB (please correct me if i'm wrong, as you are wont to do) whereas off-the-shelf [eg.WD MyBook] is NTFS and therfore has a better file allocation system.

This system is simply going to share media across 2 laptops and 1 PC on a wireless network.

All 3 computers running Windows 7 Ultimate

Any advice, costs, alternatives or even your own system setup will be happily received

Alex

 

This is what I do:

I have two external HDD: a 160GB and a 80GB. I hooked them both up to my wireless router which has USB support. After I got that to share over the network, I use my laptop and a program called allway-sync to syncronize the data between the two drives. It is not raid 1 that way, but it may be better. This setup also makes it easy for me to hook up my laptop directly to the drive (by disconnecting the USB from the router and plugging it into the laptop) so I can directly run a HDD check using seatools.

 

I just got finished installint my NAS at home. My wife wanted to make sure that we didn't lose any pictures that she has taken over the years. So, this is what I did. It isn't cheap but my name would be mud if the pictures were lost or distroyed.

1) External Hard drive for backups of the NAS
2) Promise NS4600 $425 from www.amazon.com
3) Purchased 4 SATA drives from Fry's Electronics. $69 per HDD at 750 GB

The NS4600 plugs right into the Router. So far, I am very impressed with the product and would highly suggest it. I am running a RAID5.

Okay, I know.. It's over the top but IMO, I wanted to make sure it was done right the first time.

 

Modern HDD & Caddy options allow you to use any drive format you want, from FAT12 to EXT4 through NTFS and whatever the heck Apple uses now.

You could use windows sharing options to connect the HDD & caddy to a PC, but that would require the PC to be on all the time you wanted to use the drive.

 

I bought a caddy from Maplins for £24.99, but it would only allow FAT32. Returned it this morning and I'm now about to pick up networkable WD MyBook 1TB from PCworld for £105.

I can't seem to find many networkable caddies about, even online! Am I going blind?

 

Or if you have an old PC around try freeNAS or NASlite.
I bought NASlite, its a Linux based file server embedded app if you will. It worked fine for all files between my Windows boxes.

 

If you use FreeNAS you will need a working CD-ROM drive, and probably a working Floppy Drive.

Networkable caddies are the same as NAS boxes so no help there.